Uriel Feige holds the Lawrence G. Horowitz Professorial Chair at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the Weizmann Institute. His general area of interest is that of theory of computing. Most of his work concerns coping with NP-hard problems, and includes the design and analysis of approximation algorithms, rigorous analysis of heuristics, and the study of limitations of these approaches. He shared the Gödel award in 2001, for work on the PCP theorem and hardness of approximation.

Anupam Gupta received the B.Tech degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1996, and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. After spending two years at Lucent Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in January 2003, where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department. His research interests are in the area of theoretical Computer Science, primarily in developing approximation algorithms for NP-hard optimization problems, and understanding the algorithmic properties of metric spaces. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the NSF Career award.

Roger Wattenhofer is a full professor at the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctorate in Computer Science in 1998 from ETH Zurich. From 1999 to 2001 he was in the USA, first at Brown University in Providence, RI, then at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. He then returned to ETH Zurich, originally as an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department.